Architecture and Civil Engineering: Year In Review 1995

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The most talked-about work of architecture and engineering in 1995 was what some called "the Crossroads of Europe," the immense new cluster of buildings at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel (Eurotunnel) in Lille, France.

The complex, known as Euralille, was one hour from Paris and two hours from London by train. It was to be linked by high-speed rail to Amsterdam; Brussels; Cologne, Germany; and other parts of Europe in the future and would likely serve as the nerve centre for a multinational community of 100 million people. Parts of Euralille opened in 1994 and 1995, but much was still under construction. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas created the master plan for Euralille. He also designed the vast Grand Palais, or Congrexpo, which included a conference centre, an exhibit hall, and an arena for rock concerts. Koolhaas gave each of them a different architectural appearance, using industrial materials such as corrugated polyester and aluminum, in order to create a sense of random collision and congestion--qualities that he admired and that were described in his book Delirious New York.

Other buildings, straddling the station for the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), included a slope-sided Credit-Lyonnais bank tower by French architect Christian de Portzamparc and Euralille Centre, a vast complex by Frenchman Jean Nouvel that included stores, restaurants, theatres, a business school, a sports centre, and residential apartments. Hotels, parks, and a world trade centre were also planned for Euralille.

Awards

Tadao Ando of Japan was the 1995 winner of the most prestigious international award in the field, the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Already widely honoured, Ando was known for an austere, almost monastic type of architecture, usually built of beautifully finished raw concrete, often in simple geometric shapes, and without any ornament or historic detail. "I do not believe architecture should speak too much," Ando had said. "It should remain silent and let nature in the guise of sunlight and wind speak." A believer in solid construction, Ando proudly announced that after the destructive January 17 Great Hanshin Earthquake in the Kobe, Japan, area, all of his 30 buildings in the quake zone remained intact. (SeeEARTH AND SPACE SCIENCES: Geophysics.) One of the architect’s major works was the Suntory Museum in Osaka, which opened during 1995 and contained spaces for housing contemporary art and for staging performing arts.

In an unusual move the Royal Institute of British Architects gave its Gold Medal to a teacher and critic rather than an architect: Colin Rowe, a British-born professor of architecture at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. The triennial Aga Khan Awards for Architecture were presented for 12 works of Islamic architecture, ranging from the reconstruction of historic neighbourhoods to the design of an environmentally sensitive office tower. The Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award for European Architecture was given to Nicholas Grimshaw’s Waterloo International Terminal, the British link to the Channel Tunnel. The American Institute of Architects did not award its Gold Medal in 1995. The winner of the AIA’s Twenty-Five Year Award for 1996 was announced. Given annually to a building that has proved its worth over time, the award went to the 1962 Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colo., by Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. The AIA also chose 13 buildings for its annual Honor Awards for good design. Among the more prominent of the 1995 winners were Westendstrasse 1, an office tower in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, by Kohn Pedersen Fox; Seiji Ozawa Hall, a concert space in Massachusetts by William Rawn; Arrow International, a corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood; Jacobs Field baseball park in Cleveland, Ohio, and Hong Kong Stadium in Hong Kong, both by the firm of HOK; and the Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, by James Polshek.

Cultural Buildings

Buildings intended for music or books tended to dominate world architecture in 1995. The construction of libraries was somewhat puzzling because some people were predicting that books would soon be made obsolete by electronic media. Many new libraries, however, were being envisioned as community centres, replete with day-care facilities, art galleries, and restaurants.

The most prominent and controversial library was the National Library of France. It was completed in 1995 but was not expected to be open to the public until 1997, which allowed a two-year time frame for moving 12 million books onto the library’s 435 km (270 mi) of shelves. Designed by Dominique Perrault and erected on the Left Bank of the Seine River in Paris, the structure was much criticized for being "upside down." The books, which were to be housed in glass towers that resembled office buildings, would be bathed in sunlight, while the patrons would be relegated to underground reading rooms.

Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s Library Square opened in Vancouver, B.C. A dramatic building in the shape of an oval, it resembled the ancient Colosseum in Rome. In Denver, Colo., a new main library by U.S. architect Michael Graves also employed a round shape, this time a circular rotunda set between symmetrical wings in a manner that vaguely recalled such neoclassical buildings as the U.S. Capitol. Both libraries tried to achieve a sense of grandeur by evoking memories of great buildings of the past. In San Antonio, Texas, by contrast, a new main library by Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta was a bold modern structure in bright colours of red, yellow, and blue.

In Cleveland the long-awaited Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened. It was designed by famed U.S. architect I.M. Pei, who, at age 79, admitted to journalists that in his attempts to appreciate rock music, he had progressed as far as Bruce Springsteen but could not continue any farther. Sited on the shore of Lake Erie, the Rock Hall looked like a frozen explosion, with solid chunks in the shape of cubes and cylinders seeming to blast outward from a central glass pyramid. The pyramid reminded many of Pei’s more famous pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The exhibits, designed by the Burdick Group, were a wild mix of celebrity memorabilia on the one hand and serious displays on the history of rock on the other. The actual Hall of Fame was a windowless room at the top of the building, with walls made of black glass onto which were projected the images of the stars, in a manner that recalled the stained glass windows of a cathedral.

In Paris the final phase of the Cité de la Musique opened at the edge of the Parc de la Villette. Designed by Portzamparc, it included a 2,700-seat concert hall and a museum that housed more than 4,500 historic instruments. In Japan the Kirishima International Concert Hall, in a remote mountain setting, was designed by Fumihiko Maki. Sheathed in the architect’s trademark glowing brushed-silver surfaces, it peaked in one of his "cloud" roofs: a mound of folded planes in stainless steel, looking rather like Japanese origami paper. In the countryside of Britain, a new hall for the famed Glyndebourne Opera, by Michael Hopkins, featured a horseshoe-shaped interior finished in reclaimed 150-year-old pine. Critics said the hall resembled a huge, beautifully crafted and polished instrument, such as a violin.

Other Buildings

A Korean War Veterans’ Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It included a wall of dark granite, on which were engraved ghostlike images of soldiers and other veterans. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, was designed by British architect Richard Rogers in the high-tech style of his earlier Pompidou Centre, with huge curving wings of gleaming stainless steel. In Houston, Texas, Renzo Piano of Italy, Rogers’ partner in the Pompidou design, created a small gem of a museum for the work of U.S. artist Cy Twombly. Piano also was the architect of the vast Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan, which opened in late 1994.

Competitions

With most of the German government moving to Berlin, a major design competition was held for a new U.S. embassy to be built next to the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Six prominent American architects were asked to propose designs for the embassy, with a winner to be selected by a jury of architects and diplomats. The jurors completed their work in September, but no result was announced by year’s end. In London a competition for a design to convert a riverfront power plant into a new branch of the Tate Gallery was won by the Swiss firm of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Exhibitions

The year’s most significant architectural exhibition was undoubtedly the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. Artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude (see BIOGRAPHIES), swaddled this former home of the German Parliament in translucent polypropylene. The magical effect was to convert the grim old building, for one week, into an architectural cloud formation. After the wraps came off, construction crews began the task of renovating the Reichstag, which would become, again, the German capitol. The architect for the renovation was Sir Norman Foster of Britain.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a show of the work of Koolhaas. It included drawings and models of Koolhaas’ work for Euralille, as well as other urban design plans and the architect’s unchosen but memorable proposal for the National Library of France. The Art Institute of Chicago displayed the work of Bruce Goff, an idiosyncratic follower of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Controversies and News Events

Times Square in New York City was again a topic of controversy, thanks to a proposal for a 47-story hotel for the Disney Co. designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. In cartoon fashion, the tower would be split by a curved glass "bolt of light." Disney, which planned to renovate other properties along 42nd Street, was also at work in Florida. The company opened a sales office there for Celebration, an entire new town that the company was building near Disney World and for which it was employing a star list of architects, including Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Robert A.M. Stern, and Jaquelin Robertson. With no buildings yet built, Disney instead erected full-size billboards of the future houses to entice prospective buyers. Critics noted that while the town celebrated the architecture of the American small town and evoked its vision of democracy, the community actually would be carefully controlled by the Disney corporation.

After more than a year of delay caused by technical glitches, the Denver International Airport finally opened in February, at a cost of $4.9 billion. Occupying a larger area than the entire city of Paris, the airport featured a terminal building roofed by a tent made of white membrane stretched over steel masts. It looked to some like the snowcapped Rockies, to others like a teepee encampment. In Chicago a losing battle was waged to save from demolition the Arts Club, an interior by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Two catastrophes during the year were expected to influence the architecture of the future. The April 19 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, Okla., which also damaged some 70 other buildings, was likely to lead to stricter security requirements for government architecture. Some feared the rise of a fortress mentality, ill suited to a democracy, a fear that was reinforced by a decision to close off a section of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to protect the White House. The Great Hanshin Earthquake was the first major quake ever to strike a modern downtown. It was even more devastating than the Oklahoma City bombing--many buildings toppled over into the streets, and about 6,000 people died--but it was noted that little damage was suffered by the most recently constructed buildings, which were erected according to strict earthquake codes. The problem remained of how to protect Japan’s older cities--and cities located on earthquake fault lines in other countries, such as the U.S.--from similar catastrophes in the future.

Among those who died during the year were Wolf von Eckardt, former architecture critic of the Washington (D.C.) Post, at 77. A death of another kind was the demise of the Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Mass., founded in 1946 by legendary architect Walter Gropius with a group of young partners. Once one of the largest and most successful firms in the U.S., TAC collapsed under debt in April. Robert Campbell

BRIDGES

The year 1995 started with a celebration and a shock. Fanfares were for the official opening in January of the Pont de Normandie, the world’s longest cable-stayed type, with elegant A-frame towers carrying a motorway across the Seine estuary on France’s northern coast. The 856-m-long (1 m = 3.3 ft) central composite steel and concrete span took technology a huge step forward. (For notable civil engineering projects, see below.)

The shock, quite literally, was to the world’s biggest bridge project on January 10. The earthquake in Japan looked as if it might also have damaged the half-built 500 billion yen Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge, just 10 km (1 km = 0.62 mi) from the quake’s epicentre. The bridge’s 1,990-m main span passes over the Akashi Strait, which contains one of the main fault lines in the Kobe area.

Work stopped on the bridge, but no damage was found. Still, surveys showed the quake had pushed the towers apart by 1.1 m--only 0.005% of the total span but enough to mean that suspension hangers and deck needed redesigning.

Seismic resistance was also a major design concern for other bridges as well, particularly in California, where many thousands of ordinary road bridges as well as larger crossings needed expensive retrofit strengthening to come up to modern standards. For example, the Golden Gate suspension bridge at San Francisco was now deemed unsafe even in a magnitude-7 quake. Some $175 million in upgrades would be needed to permit it to carry emergency traffic within 24 hours of a magnitude-8.5 earthquake. Portugal’s new Tagus II bridge also got a substantial working over for seismic resistance. The 420-m centre span cable-stayed bridge, on which construction began in 1994, was part of an 18-km viaduct crossing of repeated concrete spans.

Other examples of this trend in bridge building--very long composite multispan bridges, usually featuring a single main span over a shipping channel--included the bridge section on the Øresund link between Sweden and Denmark, begun in November, with its spectacular 1,200-m cable-stayed central section and a 492-m main span; the Store Bælt interisland link in Denmark, which included a tunnel and an artificial island centre point as well as the bridge with a 1,620-m main span (it would hold the world record briefly in 1997); and the second Severn crossing in Great Britain, which ran 5.2 km across the estuary, using a cable-stayed 456-m centre bridge and repeated concrete box spans between 2,000-ton caisson piers for the remainder. Canada’s Prince Edward Island project had no main bridge but rather used 250-m-long precast concrete spans to form the 11-km viaduct. The bridge piers, of special superstrength concrete to withstand ice floes, were also of interest. At 1,377 m the main span of the Tsing Ma suspension bridge in Hong Kong was shorter than Store Bælt, but the bridge was double-decked to carry rail and road traffic; cable spinning for this bridge had been completed by early summer. Part of the series of bridges linking the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge itself was yet another sample of contemporary composite multispan bridge projects.

Indeed, the Far East was where the most exciting projects were planned for coming years. China had several giant projects under consideration for crossing its big rivers, including the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), Huang Ho (Yellow River), and Zhu Jiang (Pearl River). India had three large bridges planned for the south. A hint for the next century came perhaps from a tiny five-metre slab footbridge in Oxfordshire, England. For the first time ever, plastic reinforcement was used in the concrete instead of steel.

BUILDINGS

The world’s tallest buildings were being developed in Asia in 1995. Construction of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was under way, and completion was expected toward the end of 1996. At 450 m, it would be overtaken in height by the 460-m Chongqing Tower, Chongqing, China, which was expected to be completed in 1997. A Hong Kong developer, however, was planning to complete a 468-m-tall building, the Nina Tower, by 1997. This skyscraper was to be square in plan and would feature a composite steel and concrete construction with splayed corners to reduce wind drag.

Construction on Hong Kong’s new airport at Chek Lap Kok began in 1995 with the main terminal contract awarded early in the year. A Y-shaped footprint was selected from some 50 possible designs for the building. It was 1.2 km long and accommodated 38 pier gates. The design incorporated modular steel framed barrel vaults supported on high columns, with a partially glazed roof in an attempt to create a feeling of light and space.

Mid-1995 saw the tragic collapse of a six-year-old multi-story department store in Seoul, South Korea, where more than 500 people were killed. The building, a reinforced-concrete slab construction, was supported by columns 10.8 m apart. The collapse was attributed to a failure around a column at roof level that then led to the progressive failure of other columns. The debris load on floors below then caused a collapse of the entire building.

The reunification of Germany resulted in increased construction in the former East Germany. In Leipzig, a centuries-old trading hub, a new conference and exhibition centre was being built to the north of the city to replace the outdated exhibition facilities. The focal point of the development was a 250 × 80-m steel-framed, glass-clad hall. The main structure included external arch trusses rising 28 m and spaced 25 m apart. Supported by these was a grid of steel tubes arranged in squares that, in turn, supported the glazing envelope. A smooth, highly transparent glass surface was presented internally, and efforts were also made to keep the degree of natural daylight virtually uninterrupted by the steel structure.

In Nottingham, England, a novel form of prefabrication was used to combine high quality with quick construction. An architect chose this technique to match a facades’ brickwork construction with that of other buildings in the area. Over 1,000 one-story brick piers were prefabricated. The building was also designed to reduce solar gain (increase in heat in structures with large areas of glass) and maximize the use of ambient energy in an attempt to avoid the need for air conditioning. Geoffrey M. Pinfold

DAMS

Throughout the world in 1995 there were over 60,000 dams more than 15 m high, holding back some 6,000 cu km of water. Since 1975 the rate of dam construction had slowed worldwide, with only about 300 dams being built each year. This decrease was attributed to a recognition of the damage caused to ecosystems and of the social impact of population displacement.

Less developed countries were under pressure for continued economic development, however, and believed that the alternatives, nuclear and fossil-fuel energy sources, also had objectionable environmental impacts. The growing need for food and energy called for a balance to be achieved between preservation and exploitation of the environment. Many governments had opted for dam construction.

Along this line, Pres. Nelson Mandela opened the Durban, South Africa, meeting of the International Commission on Large Dams with a reminder that more than 12 million people in South Africa were without access to reliable drinking water and that without its large dams the country would not have been able to grow as it had.

In China the controversial Three Gorges Dam was going ahead in spite of the World Bank’s withdrawal of financial aid because of environmental and resettlement concerns. In Southeast Asia the Mekong River project was revived by Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (China and Myanmar [Burma] also had been invited to join.) Thailand was expected to be the principal producer and user of the power, amounting to 80%, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia sharing the rest. In Nepal the Arun III Dam was being proposed at a site in the Himalayan region, but there too the World Bank withdrew its funding after pressure from environmental groups.

India’s first private dam project, the Baspa II Dam, got under way, although debates over resettlement issues caused a slowdown in construction. Turkmenistan started its third dam since it became independent. The Madav Dam would form a 250 million-cu m reservoir to regulate the flooding of the Tedzhen River. The national plan called for seven new reservoirs by the year 2004. Despite economic and financial boycotts, Iran pushed forward its dam program, with the 120-m-high Zanjan Dam and the 126-m-high Kowsar Dam, the latter of which was to store 450 million cu m of irrigation and drinking water.

Ethiopia accelerated its dam building program to increase the supply of potable water, and Oman was responding to its water shortage by building numerous aquifer recharge dams, which, although small, would store water that would otherwise be lost.

South Africa and Swaziland embarked on a joint venture to develop a series of dams to regulate the waters of the Komati River. Five dams would be involved, with the Maguga Dam to be started in 1996. Morocco announced an ambitious program to provide a million hectares under irrigation by the year 2000. The Itaipú Dam, the largest in the world in both output and size, was completed in Brazil.

In the U.S. the extensive drought helped gain approval for the Domenigoni Valley off-stream dam project, intended to create a reservoir with a capacity of 1,010,000,000 cu m of water serving the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. Also in California, the Auburn Dam, which had been stopped in 1975 because of fears of earthquakes, was revived as a solution to flood threats on the American River. A final decision was not expected soon because alternatives were being presented. On the Santa Ana River near Los Angeles, the Seven Oaks Dam was being built to provide flood control and was scheduled to be completed in the year 2000.

ROADS

One of the abiding images of 1995 was the crumpled section of the Hanshin Expressway in the Japanese city of Kobe, which collapsed during the January 17 earthquake. Once again questions were raised about the wisdom of constructing elevated highways in earthquake-prone regions.

Massive highway projects were being planned throughout Asia. China was increasing its road network at the rate of about 13,000 km (1 km = 0.6 mi) each year, providing both urban and long-distance routes. The Shanghai ring road, a 48-km four-lane highway, was opened, helping to ease congestion in one of the world’s largest and busiest cities. Three major expressways running north-south and three running east-west would provide the country with a basic network. South Korea announced plans to triple its expressway system to over 4,500 km within 30 years. A $1.2 billion plan to provide a road network linking China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma)--was agreed upon between the governments of those six countries. The project would be paid for by tolls, with initial funding from the Asian Development Bank.

The use of tolls to pay for new infrastructure, usually through a build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract arrangement, was becoming increasingly common throughout the world. Under these arrangements a private company would build the highway and then be permitted to charge tolls for a designated period of years, after which the highway would revert to government ownership. Indonesia invited bids for the construction of 770 km of toll roads worth an estimated $2.7 billion, mostly on the island of Java. India invited similar proposals for eight highways and nine bridges, together valued at $300 million. The Pakistan National Highway Authority announced plans for 754 km of highways--the largest being a 270-km two-lane expressway linking the Karachi port with Hub Chauki--which were to be offered as BOT contracts.

In Russia a 700-km highway to link Moscow with St. Petersburg was being studied, as were highways to link Moscow with Warsaw, Poland, and Kiev, Ukraine. It was estimated that 1% of all road bridges in Russia collapsed each year. Hungary was seen as a good example of the use of BOT contracts, with the first privately funded highway--the 42-km, $370 million M1 motorway--opened in 1995. Five further motorway sections totaling 580 km were under construction and were scheduled to open between 1996 and 2003.

In the United Kingdom a novel form of private finance was being planned. Under a design-build-finance-operate contract, a private company would assume all responsibility for the construction of a highway but would not collect tolls. Instead, costs would be paid by so-called "shadow tolls"; the road would be free for motorists, but the government would compensate the builder as if tolls had been charged.

In Toronto construction began on Highway 407, the world’s first all-electronic tolled highway. In order to use the highway, drivers would be required to use transponding equipment fitted with "smart cards," and all tolls would be charged automatically. A similar project was begun in Melbourne, Australia.

In the U.S. the first privately owned and operated highway constructed in the 20th century was completed and opened to traffic. The 22.5-km Dulles Greenway connected Leesburg, Va., to Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. State Route 91 in California was the first highway in the U.S. to employ "congestion pricing," where motorists were charged higher tolls at busier times of day.

TUNNELS

New tunneling techniques were introduced in 1995 to cope more efficiently with difficult ground conditions or logistically difficult projects. Odd as it may sound, the injection of foam into the excavation chamber of soft-ground earth pressure balance (EPB) pressurized tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) was being used as a soil-conditioning agent to counterbalance the pressure within the water-bearing soils. The purpose behind this operation was to decrease the permeability of the soil and give it a homogeneous consistency for more favourable extrusion through the screw conveyor of the EPB technique. Consisting mostly of air, the foam bubbles eventually would disappear, leaving a slightly moist, easily handled soil.

Major mechanical advances took place in Japan, where a triple-headed TBM was launched to excavate the three chambers of a 17-m-wide ×7.5-m-high underground station for the Osaka Metro all in one pass, and segment robots on the eight TBMs working on the Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway project were lifting and placing the eleven 10-metric ton precast concrete segments in each 1.5-m-wide ×650-mm-thick ring of segmental lining. These robots also fitted and tightened the 110 bolts in each bolting ring, all totally automatically. Such developments were yet to be employed outside Japan. In London the technique of compensation grouting was developed to sophisticated levels to control surface settlement and prevent damage to buildings as the tunnels for the new Jubilee Line Extension of the Underground network passed close by such famous landmarks as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. The technique compensated for the predicted amount of settlement by injecting thin horizontal lenses of grout or mortar into the ground above the tunnel alignment and below the foundations of the sensitive structures. When grout was applied gently and skillfully, settlement was effectively eliminated, which restored the slight declivities back to normal level ground.

Large-scale excavation for metro systems also continued during 1995 beneath Lisbon, Paris, Cairo, Munich, Washington, and Los Angeles, where in June a section of tunnel collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in Hollywood Boulevard.

The tunneling industry awaited official reports from the British Institution of Civil Engineers and the U.K. Health and Safety Executive concerning the safe use of NATM (New Austrian Tunneling Method), or shotcrete-supported tunneling, in urban areas following the collapse of NATM tunneling at Heathrow Airport in October 1994. A full year later the exact cause of the collapse was not known. Despite the delayed reports, NATM work was resumed on the Heathrow Express Railway project and on London’s Jubilee Line Extension. NATM work also continued on the Munich Metro following a collapse in 1994 that claimed three lives.

Urgent remedial work to a London underground tunnel under the River Thames was delayed by more than six months when an injunction initiated by historical societies prevented the application of shotcrete to strengthen the interior of the structure. The brick-lined tunnel, finished in the mid-1800s, was the first-ever subaqueous tunnel in soft ground. Covering the interior with layers of shotcrete was adopted as the most appropriate and cost-effective method of renovating the tunnel and ensuring public safety. Historical societies wanted to preserve the interior as a monument of English heritage even though there was no public access into the tunnel nor could the interior be seen from within the passing trains. Shani Wallis